LATIN CLASSES WERE A PAIN, AND THAT'S VERITAS

As a septuagenarian, I occasionally bemoan certain changes that have befallen the world since I grew up. But one change I enthusiastically go along with - there aren't too many others - is the decline in Latin study in high school and college.

It's hard enough for most high school students to grow up learning to speak and write decent English. With today's multiple demands for skill in communications, computers, math, modern languages and science, who has time in high school today to cope with Caesar, Cicero, Virgil and their ancient ilk?

Yes, I'm all for the liberal arts. I agree that cultural studies are worthwhile even though they don't bring you big bucks. But how useful a "mental discipline" is a language that nobody speaks anymore?

Yes, I know Latin survives in a few churches, despite the Vatican's switch to living languages. Yes, I know the pope speaks Latin with his cardinals and sends out papal bulls in Latin that have to be translated to make sense.

But we live in a relentlessly utilitarian age. Why drive a horse and buggy when you can ride in a modern auto?

When I fumbled my way through Newport News High School in the 1930s, I spent four frustrating years trying to learn Latin conjugations and declensions. My first mentor was Miss Mabel Barham, an able and conscientious lady who taught me such pearls as "Veni, vidi, vici" and "O tempora! O mores." But I found it useless and terminally dull. I tried to convince my parents that the same time spent learning French or Spanish would have helped me much more, but they had both studied Latin and liked it. So back to the books, I went.

Our Latin classes at NNHS were made up of fast track students headed for college. And because most colleges in the 1930s still required Latin for admission, I had to spend five hours each week hating it.

It was consoling to me later to learn that Thomas Jefferson wrote disparagingly of "the learned lumber of Greek and Latin" and that Winston Churchill low-rated Latin, too. But in the benighted 1930s, the liberal arts traditions of the medieval universities still weighed heavily on academia in the United States.

Miss Barham tried hard to make us like Caesar and his friends. She even tried to humanize the subject by arranging Roman banquets, at which we students dressed in sheets and lay on benches eating with our fingers. I still remember my embarrassment.

Our Latin class was an odd mixture of people. The biggest guy in the class was Scott Copeland, son of the editor of the Daily Press, whose name we translated into Latin doggerel and called "Scotius Copeterra." The Groucho Marx comedian of the class was Wallace Hiden, who was to die as a flier in World War II. Once, when Miss Barham left the classroom momentarily (she probably went out to cry), a tough amateur boxer named Jimmy Bond got teed off with Wallace and picked him up and deposited outside the classroom window, among the hydrangeas.

It's hard to believe now, but in those years some high school valedictory addresses were still given in Latin. Colleges even engraved their names on diplomas in Latin, like "Giulensis et Maria" or some such. Instead of giving a simple bachelor of arts degree some gave an "artium baccalorium," or some such.

I do remember a few useful things I learned, perhaps, like ending feminine names with an "a" and masculine ones with an "us," but that never got me very far.

I finally concluded that Latin was chiefly an intellectuals' status symbol that scholars had perpetuated since the Middle Ages to impress lesser mortals. For many centuries past, ambitious young men who wanted to be professors, lawyers, or doctors had learned Latin to succeed and then imposed the deadly language on the next generation of ambitious guys.

Nowadays, few students take Latin because few prep schools and colleges require it. Instead, there's more time for learning useful modern languages. Today progressive schools are including Russian, Japanese and Chinese. After all, we're becoming a global village, and not everybody in the village speaks English.

Seriously, though, I don't deny the importance of Greece and Rome in world history, and if any high schoolers really want to study their languages, more power to them. Certainly the history and culture of those ancient civilizations remain relevant, although Latin is no longer the core of the liberal arts curriculum. Eureka!

Miss Barham was obviously relieved back in the 1930s when I graduated from her class into Miss Willie Shelton's. And Miss Willie was equally happy when I passed on into Miss Elma Free's. Each dear lady had tried in vain to make me appreciate "The glory that was Greece and the grandeur that was Rome," but my heart just wasn't in it. I'm consoled that other utilitarians like Thomas Jefferson and Winston Churchill felt pretty much the same.